THE LATINA BOOK CLUB

The Latina Book Club celebrates LATINX HERITAGE MONTH every day. To honor Latino / Latinx authors during this celebratory month, we will highlight a new book and author every day. Join us and #ReadLatinoLit. University of Oklahoma Press THIS AMERICAN AUTOPSY: POEMS By Josè Antonio Rodríguez SUMMARY:   In this powerful collection of free-verse poetry, immigrant, poet, and memoirist José Antonio Rodríguez encapsulates the experiences of an artist and citizen caught between two worlds. At once deeply personal and thematically expansive, these works offer a bracing look at the darker impulses of contemporary America. Saturated with allusions to family, immigration, sexuality, and violence,  This American Autopsy   is also an unsettling meditation on life and death. With its provocative title, the collection calls to mind an image of our nation as a body awaiting examination to determine the cause of death. In this scenario the poet vacilla...

    “The world is full of sorrow,” Agapita whispered to Alfonso. Did she stamp those words into his destiny? University of Oklahoma Press The story of Alfonso, a Nuevo Mexicano, begins with his birth, when the   curandera  Agapita delivers these haunting words into his infant ear. What then unfolds is an elegiac song to the llanos of New Mexico where Alfonso comes of age. As this exquisite novel charts Alfonso’s life journey from childhood through his education and evolution as a writer, renowned Chicano author Rudolfo Anaya invites readers to reflect on the truths and mysteries of the human condition. Because Alfonso “didn’t write his own biography,” it falls to his childhood friend, the anonymous narrator here, to tell his story, through a series of letters addressed to a mysterious figure named K. The narrator depicts young Alfonso caught between dual influences: his beloved, devout Catholic mother, Rafaelita, and the folk healer Agapita. Aft...